BRITISH politics, government and statecraft are in meltdown. Never has a UK Prime Minister been held in such open contempt by the public, while across public life the entire British establishment is in disarray and terminal decline.

Scotland and rUK have never seemed for many – in particular independence supporters – so far apart, yet for all this there is a strange, audible listlessness about Scottish politics.

First there is the incumbency and obvious exhaustion of the SNP in office for fifteen years and secondly, the independence question – and underlying that, challenges on tactics, strategy, detail, tone and how you do politics.

Discussions on this subject usually descend into tropes of bashing the SNP leadership, demanding they do better, or asking that we “believe in Nicola”.

This of course makes it all about the SNP leadership, and does not tackle long-term fundamentals about why there is such a lack of confidence in the SNP and the wider independence movement about the big stuff.

For one, there is a lack of dynamism in talking about the substance of independence, and the choices and landscape it will entail and create.

On another level, there is too much hyperbole and listening to people who hold the same certain views on independence. This fails to then recognise that the unconvinced hold the key to this debate and require different messaging, or that the case for the Union still needs to be understood to counteract.

Yet while these are all important, what is even bigger is the missing recognition of the degree of success of the notion of independence and why (because of this) it should have a confidence about itself, its prospects and future.

Independence has changed Scotland, the debate about this nation, how we see ourselves and are seen across the world, and in doing so has come in from the cold and become the mainstream.

Independence is now about more than constitutional politics, and instead is about how people see Scotland, where we are going, our future and the collective stories we tell ourselves.

Scotland used to be very British; our debates on politics, economy and society were just like the rest of the UK. That began to change from the apex of British politics here – 1955 – when four years later Scotland began to shift to Labour, as England shifted further to the Tories and Harold Macmillan won a 100-seat UK majority.

The reasons for this shift were many. Scottish unemployment was rising relative to the rest of the UK; economic growth was falling behind.

Critically, government, public agencies and business began to talk about Scotland as a specific territory and area needing its own solutions such as the Toothill Report and Oceanspan, rather than to just think of UK-wide interventions.

Add to this the nuclear question and the coming of Polaris to the Clyde, the rise of CND and the new left, and connected to this, the emergence of a folk music protest movement, and Scotland began to move to a different political dynamic.

Detail always matters in politics, but more important is the long-term grain of societal change. Scotland has been slowly decoupling itself from UK politics, and then the UK, from the end of the 1950s and early 1960s.

This has given the British state multiple chances to reform the UK and address Scottish self-government.

But what it has consistently failed to do is to understand that part of the Scottish question is the nature of the British state and its failure to democratise – and worse, its degeneration.

In this, Scottish opinion has not only shifted on Scotland, but has more and more said of the UK “this is not who we are or want to be”.

The shifting sands of the idea of Scotland do not pose one essentialist country or a debate which ever completely ends (The End of History, anyone?).

But the shifting sands of the dominant idea of Scotland have to be seen as the backdrop that led to the rise of the self-government question in recent decades, got Scotland a Parliament, witnessed the ascendancy of the SNP, and saw an indyref which made independence part of the mainstream.

This means independence has to act and think about the wind behind its sails. This entails breaking with such false binaries as impatient versus ultra-cautious, independence now versus independence by osmosis, and those who see it as all about the merits or demerits of the SNP leadership.

A confident independence which sees itself as the future will think about how it manifests the idea of Scotland as a self-governing country in the here and now.

It would recognise that this is not all about the next indyref, how it is called or what happens when Westminster says no. All of that is the politics of process – and misses that an indyref is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Rather, we need to recognise the fundamentals that influence us. The UK is in a state of terminal decay and decline.

The British state which once prided itself on its progressive credentials is a force for reaction and punitiveness domestically and internationally. Day by day, the UK Government seems to further degenerate and find new lows.

That means that Scottish independence has to have a moral dimension which does not assume that Scots are morally superior to anyone else in the UK, but demands that we do better than the bastardised UK state not just by default but by design.

It necessitates that we have a strategic understanding, democratic intellect and pluralism, diversity and tolerance at its heart, listening to the Scotland not yet won over.

This means recognising the journey that Scotland has travelled in its long revolution and the pressures which come with success and becoming the mainstream.

A politics of timescale is central to this, differentiating ends and means, SNP and independence, and the importance of the human dimension and listening to the many different Scottish constituencies. Scotland has, and is changing, and won’t be put back in the box anytime soon.